Boston’s Tribute to Chinatown’s Everyday Heroes

There's a near infinite number of stories that need to be told and that need to be shared with all of the ferocity that was given to their erasure so that people can find the ones that speak to them, so that people can find. And I think it's important to tell those stories because they're the ones that we can see ourselves.

Where we can see the potential of ourselves to be heroic, not because we're the general on the horse or the great man of history, but because In a critical moment, we made a choice to do the right thing, and it had a bigger impact than we expected.

This is Monumental, a podcast series produced by PRX. I'm your host, Ashley C. Ford. That voice we just heard is Sue Mobley. She's Director of Research at Monument Lab, a nonprofit that fosters critical discussions about monuments. Sometimes it's hard to know which came first. What is heroic? And for the powerful people who Usually people who look like vacuum.

But if we're at a moment where we Then it might be For starters, Monument Lab's audit of monuments across the U.S. and its territories made clear something. There are a lot of white dudes on horseback out there. That clearly can change, but then there's another question. What if the hero, the subject of a monument, isn't an individual, but a group, a collective, a community? What does that look like? How might that change how we imagine ourselves?

Because that leads to perhaps an even bigger question. What do we consider heroic? People make over and over in quiet and hard to notice. It's heroic to make a lot of people. to do the difficult and often invisible What if a monument represented how these choices add up and how they build the communities So many of us. Producer Heidi Shin brings us the story of how the city of Boston is creating.

It's a pretty typical day on the Boston Commons, a grassy green park in downtown Boston. And Rocky Talk of Freedom Trail begins at 11.30. There are tour guides in colonial garb, hoop dresses and big white wigs, and tourists stop and squint to read the plaque. I'm here with an artist named Wen T Sen. He says there are just too many monuments in Boston to count. generals on horsebacks. Of course I don't remember the name. Nobody does.

Satness being a bit facetious. He's actually well versed in history and art. But he's commenting that, well, many of the monuments here look a lot alike. Mostly male. And they're all from mostly 19th century. Country's origin. There are statues of power. Focus on the white. Green fathers bothers them. He says that presidents and war heroes are literally put on pedestals in our streets. This question, where are the workers? The people whose hard physical labor helped. country.

Public art that celebrates workers. Well, now this is going to change. It's finally happening. When T San got Boston. Chinatown workers down. But pulling all this off and making it happen has been a journey. One that took Wenty Sen many, many years.

A few blocks away in Chinatown, the canopy of green trees is gone. Men are clunking down metal ramps. They're delivering fresh fish. There's a smell of fresh baked butter. Nothing here is manicured. It's colorful, concrete, neon, gritty. To me, as an Asian American, it's familiar. The kinds of places my parents would take me to get groceries as a kid.

Wenti Sun takes me to his favorite Chinese roast duck shop. Seem very popular, huh? Yeah. But it's hard to get through the door with so many people in line, mostly shoppers with large final bags of produce. Sen is a fixture in Boston's Chinatown. But this wasn't always the case. Sun came to Boston as an international student in the nineteen fifties. He was an outsider to Chinatown then. Young, wide-eyed, and wealthy, an art school was calling him.

He found an apartment in the historic Beacon Hill neighborhood. There was a Chinese laundromat down the street, and he was curious about the laundromat. I was asking him how no how how's his life, basically. But they spoke different dialects, Mandarin versus Toisanese, so they couldn't understand each other. And the laundryman was busy with work. And he just thought I'm just a big bother to him. He says you wave his hand in a very dismissive way.

It only made Sen more curious. Someone who looked a bit like him, Chinese in the US, but from a very different social class. Sen and his art school friends, who were not Asian, would also eat at restaurants in Chinatown. When his friends cracked racist jokes about the wait staff, Sen wasn't sure how to respond. I was astonished and suddenly realized there is this hidden racism against the Chinese. This is what the Then in the 1970s came the Vietnam War.

And Sen began to sense the shift in his own identity. The Marines have burned this old couple's cottage because fire was coming from here. He realized that regardless of how he saw himself, white American society would have their own perceptions about him. were likely to see him as an outsider and lump him together with all the other agents.

At the time, it was a new term, this hyphenated identity, being Asian American. These realizations about his identity helped Wan Tisan to grow as an artist, and the Chinatown took notice. Then in 1986, nearly 30 years after coming to the US, Sen was hired to paint his first mural in Chinatown. And since then, he's had a lot of other art projects within the community.

But so much of the artwork he created has already come and gone. The trouble is mural can never last very long. So in recent years, he started to scheme about something more permanent. Bronze statues like the ones he'd seen in Europe. But instead of honoring the powerful and privileged, he would honor immigrant labor. His opportunity came in twenty twenty two.

I heard that Michelle Wu that uh Mayor Wu took a tour of Chinatown and stopped at one of your murals. Yes. And I heard you were there. Yes. It's the only time that I met the mayor and I presume she knows who I am. Wen T Sen saw his chance and stepped forward. Yes, uh my name is Wen Tsen. Never mind about this mural. He told the mayor about his new idea. And I have a vision of actually creating full.

bronze statues of Chinese workers so that we have a real material equity for the monuments of the city. A new kind of monument, he said. Statues honoring Chinatown's workers. In fact, he'd already submitted a proposal to her office. The next day, the mayor's office called back and they announced they would fund the project. They offered$1 million in support.

But wait, was it really that easy? I I think it's just a pure luck for my part. Truth be told, the City of Boston did not decide to fund the Chinatown Workers Project overnight. The idea came to him in his art school days. When he first met that laundryman down the street. different versions of it over the years. This was half-size concept with the laundry shop. First dioramas that look like shrines, then as murals, then as life-size wooden cutouts.

Then in 2020 came the surge in attacks against Asian Americans during the COVID pandemic. When President Trump dubbed the coronavirus the China flu, and Asian Americans were scapegoated for the pandemic. And acts of violence against Asian Americans ensued. Go back to whatever f you

These are just some of the gruesome reminders a woman has from last Sunday night. Following Lee into her apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side before fatally stabbing her. Another man knocked to the ground in broad daylight. The senseless death of 84-year-old. Thai immigrant Vishar Ratanakpakti. So many of our elders being violently attacked. The sense of urgency to give voice to Asian American stories was growing.

Asian Americans were literally being beaten and dying because the president of our country was reinforcing negative stereotypes, making it seem legitimate to target the AAPI community. The next year in 2021, Mayor Michelle Wu, the city's first Asian American woman mayor, was elected into office in Boston. From every corner of our city, Boston has spoken. We are ready to meet this moment. We are ready to become a Boston for everyone.

In the face of Black Lives Matter and anti-Asian hate, there were moves to take down old monuments across the country. It was just a very good moment that people are saying we're tearing down Robert G. Lee's statues. And Mayor Michelle Wu agreed with the movement underfoot. I reached out to Mayor Michelle Wu's office to hear her thoughts. She sent me this response.

Public art emphasizes our values and priorities as a city. A number of years ago, there was some cataloging done and community members shared that in fact, In a city with one of the most historic Chinatown communities anywhere in the country. There was just one statue of a person of Asian descent all throughout Boston, and that was the statue of Confucius outside the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association building in Chinatown.

And we Don't often see those statues or place names memorializing the women, people of color, immigrants, especially those who are members of the working class who shaped our city.

In Boston, we're working to create a city for everyone. And to do that, we're designing public art in partnership with our community that reflects the stories that have gone unrepresented for far too long. At last, in twenty twenty two, the city greenlit the Boston Chinatown workers statues. On another day, I see more of Chinatown with Lydia Lowe. She's the executive director of the Chinatown Community Land Trust. and the fiscal partner for the Chinatown Workers Project.

She's showing me parts of the neighborhood that I hadn't noticed before, like the garment factories. So that's one of the older buildings here. And right around here, actually, there was a laundry in the 1800s. She says to look up, right there, above that. That was an old factory where Chinese women sewed clothes for big brands in the 1980s and 90s.

They were paid about 25 cents per piece to sew a lot of the clothes and shoes that you and I probably wore. And the Garment Workers Union building, some of the floors actually had factories. Lydia Lowe worked in a similar factory in San Francisco years ago. Not as a seamstress, but as a college student doing temp work. She managed the garment workers, who were mostly older Chinese American women.

Her job was to count their meager wages and to check their bags when they left the factory. To make sure that they weren't stealing anything, um, which was really appalling to me. She wrote this poem in response to that experience. This poem is called Quitting Time. The long bell blared, and then the lobon made me search all your bags before you could leave. Inside he sighed about slow work, fast hands, missing spools of thread, and I said nothing.

I remember that day you came in to show me I added your ticket six zippers short. It was just a mistake. It's painful for her to remember what happened at that factory, where she was pitted against someone that looked so much like her own mother. You squinted down at the check in your hands like an old village woman peers at some magician's trick.

That afternoon when you thrust me your bags, I couldn't look or raise my face. Doim Ju. Eyes on the ground I could only see one shoe kicking against the other. The indignities that Lydia witnessed, they're nothing new. They're echoes of what immigrant laborers have dealt with in this country over centuries. You know, our entire country was really built on stolen labor.

When she says stolen labor, she's not just talking about slavery. She also means hundreds of years of immigrant labor. Workers who are underpassed. My name is Roland Xu. I'm uh director of research of the Chinese Railroad Workers Project in North America at Stanford University. Rule and Chu says that Chinese Americans have been here in significant numbers since the eighteen forties, helping to build the US economy, first as miners, then to build the country's first transcontinental railroad.

So they would use metal spikes to drill a hole, pack it with gunpowder, light it and run. Oh my gosh. Not provided any other plan except run as fast as you can. Sometimes they were doing this though inside tunnels. The railroad workers worked from dawn until dusk, and they were under pressure from their managers to work even faster. And so if the explosive went off in a certain way before they could exit the tunnel, the tunnel collapsed on them.

Over a thousand Chinese workers are thought to have died. We don't even know their names, because if you were Chinese, they didn't include your full name on the payroll records. You're just listed as John Chinaman. as uh China ox cart driver, China blacksmith, China servant, and alongside all the Caucasian names, the Macphersons and Smiths

and Wilson's you can find them there and in fact it's beautifully cataloged in Ancestry.com. So there are many who can trace their personal family members through there. If you're white. If you're white. My in-law's family came to North America from China around this time in the 1800s. We don't know their names, how they came, what work they did. That part of our family history is lost. The railroad wouldn't have been built without Chinese workers. They made up about ninety percent of the work.

And yet, there's this famous photo that we see in the US history textbooks when the railroad was finally complete. This was in 1869. There are dozens of workers, men sitting on train tracks on top of the engines, celebrating the symbolic last spike on the track. the famous Golden Spike, and the champagne was poured for the white workers. The Chinese were excluded from the photographs. Up to fifteen thousand workers are said to have come from China for this work.

But in this iconic photo, it's as if they were never there. The completion of the railroad was transformative. It changed the way America operated. It allowed the country's economy to boom. It made travel and large scale shipping possible. It made westward expansion possible.

But despite the contributions of Chinese Americans, They were still vilified. Still seen as outsider. Here's Russell Jung, Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Any disease and epidemic that spread in California were blamed on Chinese. Tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, the bubonic plague. Political cartoons depicted Chinese as dirty people to be kept out.

Arsenists set Chinatowns on fire. They were unwanted competition for jobs. And with the pressure from labor unions, eventually the U.S. government passed a law in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act. that banned any more Chinese people from coming to the US for decades. So after the railroads were built, the Chinese American men then turned to mining, farming, and lumbering, also to laundry work and restaurants. They often did what was considered women's work.

It was considered female work and because the West was predominantly a male-dominated society, no one wanted to do the laundry, and it took really little capital to create a laundromat. You know, you just needed soap and a washboard. Then in 1943, when the US became allies with China during World War II, immigration laws changed. Now Chinese women were also allowed to immigrate to the US.

They took jobs sewing in garment factories, in sweatshops, essentially, in the buildings that we see in Chinatowns across the country today. Chinese Americans through multiple generations have done a lot to make actually what it is now. So when people say to go back to where you came from, hateful words that Asian Americans hear all the time. That doesn't really make sense. When we think about who built our country's foundations,

Immigrant laborers aren't part of the literal picture. That is what artist Wenty Sen is trying to change with the Chinatown Workers Project.

Good to see you. Perfect timing. Back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I'm visiting Wendy Sen's studio to learn more about his process as an artist and why he wanted to build these statues. I was born in China in 1936, which makes me uh eighty-seven years old. He doesn't look eighty-seven. He wears trendy red glasses and a gray crew neck. So this is my office. And uh are you taping this?

This is very messy, so it's accumulation of years and years of work. Born in Shanghai, Sen fled China during World War Two on a luxury liner. Shipped off to prep school in London, but skipped class and hitchhiked through Europe instead. He toured art galleries from Italy to Paris and drew portraits along the way. In his studio, we see all these influences.

It's an interesting mix of European and sort of art and community art. Yeah. Amongst the paintbrushes, charcoals, and old school cameras, there are his mementos, a renaissance portrait of baby Jesus. Images inspired by Chinese Cultural Revolution. And a plastic John Wayne figurine. And why is he there? Those American Westerns. I grew up with them in Shanghai and then in Paris.

The personal photos reveal even more gems. Much like his travels, Wenty Sen's work moves deftly through genres: a small diorama, a Chinese shrine, larger-than-life paintings reminiscent of Edward. all evidence of his talent and his many years of art school training.

We sit down to talk about his ideas for this new memorial for Boston, the Chinatown Workers Project. San is planning to build four statues to honor the workers he's gotten to know in Chinatown over the years. A laundryman, a restaurant worker, a carmester. And recognizing the worker who made it possible for all these folks to go out and do their jobs? a grandmother, doing the unpaid labor of caring for her grandchild.

Once fully constructed, they'll be installed on the streets of Boston's Chinatown. For now, there's small clay models in progress. The details of the clay models are subtle. The slight set of the grandmother's Uh she sits on the side. Her fingers are about to move out to reach to the child, an eight or nine-year-old girl in front of her. Do grandma show the love for the child without indication.

gestures. A garment worker seated at a sewing machine. A restaurant worker standing skillfully handling a cleaver. The laundryman with his hand on top of his handiwork. A pile of customers' clean, folded clothing. He's not about to give it to him yet. And the hand movement is has a power in it. But the power is both controlling his job as well as the the client. Zen says that the laundryman has dignity. He's looking directly at his customer, saying, I am a person.

The research that went into creating these workers' statues was not easy. There aren't that many historical photos documenting what Chinatown's workers look like in Boston in the 19th and early 20th centuries. That's all the more reason to build these statues. There's so little evidence of this community's history.

As for the garment worker, Sen found an actual Singer sewing machine from an old Chinatown factory and used it as a model for his garment worker sculpture. They say we're gonna throw it out. Do you want it? I say, yeah, sure. San also visited his favorite roast duck restaurant in Chinatown. He brought his camera, but the chef chopped so quickly, eager to show off his skills, that Sen could barely take any usable photos.

He chuckles as he remembers the scene. I think he was very proud of his ability to cut up a trunk in no no time at all. As for the restaurant worker, Sen said that these workers typically wear hats to keep their hair in place. But he wanted to show the worker's eyes and expression clearly. So there was a simple solution. I shaved his head w which solved that problem.

For a few other choices, he did go with art over accuracy too. Like who would be working at a sewing machine and not looking at their fingers, right? You get needles through your fingers. For statues, Wenti Sen didn't want the workers' eyes to be focused on their work. All of them have that moment. He says they're not just workers. They have dreams. They want to make a better life for So he has their gaze looking ahead of them at the future. Zen says the average height of Chinese immigrants

generations was about five foot seven. But the final versions of his statue actually be a little bit bigger once they're permanently installed. So that people can still be eye level of a five six five eight person with Being overdominant. He designed the workers' outfits to be somewhat generic because he wants the viewer to see them as representing immigrant workers in general, and not just those in Chinatown.

like workers from Italian workers, Irish immigrant workers and from Puritans. They all work The goal is to honor all immigrant workers from all parts of the world who have come and will continue to come to contribute to life in America.

Simply by focusing on them as ordinary people, Wenty Sen is subverting a narrative that's hundreds of years old. Russell Jung, professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, reminds us that racist depictions have been plaguing Chinese immigrants from when they first arrived in the 1800s. advertisements. Always had derogatory pictures of Chinese. For rat poison would have pictures of Chinese eating rats to show the effectiveness of the rat poison that

Like the Chinese it would kill the rats. Then moving pictures entrenched these images. Fu Manchu. It is said that the devil plays for men's souls. And then his counterpart was Charlie Chan. May I ask please how it happened miserable number two son and unfortunate driver of automobile find selves in police lockup all night? Well, Mr. Chandler didn't like it. Professor Russell Jung's mother was actually an extra in Hollywood.

The lead roles, like Charlie Chan, were played by white actors in Yellowface. But the extras were Chinese American. Yeah, the movies were racist, but Zhang says the work paid better than picking produce on the farms. So they'd act in films with all these stereotypes. Prostitute with a heart of gold that became pretty popular, especially after World War II, Korean War, Vietnam, the Asian prostitute became a pretty popular stereotype in movies and books.

And it's not just this stereotype. There are a lot of problematic depictions of Asian Americans in movies and TV shows. Like Austin Powers, Mean Girls, and The Office. But arguably, the worst depiction was in the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket. I feel queasy hearing these. Plus, there's a newer stereotype of Asian Americans, the model minority. news accounts and then later mid media portrayals often showed us as well educated, overachieving, hardworking,

Almost three weeks after the Oscars comes yet another apology from the Academy. This time it's over host Chris Rock's edgy joke that featured those three Asian kids who Rock joked were accountants. The results of tonight's Academy Awards have been tabulated by the accounting firm of Price, Waterhouse, and Cooper. They sent us their most dedicated, accurate, and hard-working representatives. So I want you to please welcome. Ming Zhu, Bao Ling, and David Mosquit.

This image of the model minority is problematic too. There's actually a huge disparity between high earning and low income Asian Americans. Some come with work visas seeking a better life. Others are trafficked and undocumented and working class. Still, others are here as refugees, displaced by war. And of course, we are not all good at math. This is one of the reasons why Russell Jung really appreciates the Chinatown Workers Project.

The statutes of Chinatown's laborers remind us that Asian Americans are not a monolith. The problem with American media is that we don't see all these different types of Asian Americans. Consuming these ideas and images embeds them into your subconscious. Then when you actually meet someone who is Chinese or Chinese American The biases are too deeply rooted, and it's hard to see the person before you as a real person.

When President Donald Trump decided to scapegoat Asian Americans for the COVID pandemic, people began boycotting Chinatowns across the US, and acts of violence and hatred surged against Asian Americans. Tonight, 21-year-old Robert Long is under arrest, charged with murdering eight people, and what is now the deadliest mass shooting here in more than a year and a half. Name-calling, bullying, elders shoved to sidewalks, and then eventually killing young women.

in San Francisco, New York, and Atlanta. And thinking about Sen statues brought all this home to me. As an Asian American woman, I carry the weight of these stereotypes too. The cat calls walking down the street, the questions about where I come from, or shouts of random ching chong. at school who pulled up the corners of their eyes. The fear of standing They happened to me because of the years of racist images that Americans have.

Now sun statues are saying that we are not Chinatown's workers are not gangsters, not geishas, not properties. Spring and spread. When we come back to the Explores. Chinatown workers' statues are already in space. That's next on the next one. PRX. in a moment.

This is Monumental from PRX. I'm your host, Ashley C. Ford. Let's get back to our story. The City of Boston is planning to officially install the worker statues on the sidewalks of Boston's Chinatown. Hopefully in 2025. In the meantime, there are smaller scaled clay models of the statues that have been on exhibit at a gallery in the neighborhood called the POW Art Center. It's not just an art gallery, it's also a community space. Workers come for karaoke. On Fridays, the Chinese opera troops.

And when they pass through the gallery, they're not going to be able to do display models for when he sends worker statues. Worked in Boston's garment factories back in the nineteen seventies and eighties. The two didn't get to see Wendy Sen's statues on exhibit, but I did show them a photo of Sen's garment worker statue. Lydia Lowe from the Tinatown Community Land Trust helps interpret for them. Yeah, you're good.

It's familiar, they say, especially the outfit. When I come here, I look in the the woman dress well the old style. Back in Hong Kong, where Hong immigrated from, the women were very stylish. In fact, one of Hong's friends warned her of what she had heard about immigrant life. Back in Hong Kong, Hang's husband was very well educated. When they got to the US, he found a job as a restaurant dishwasher. The work was physical for them both.

The bed one is so hot so hurt sometime. Their backs hurt, and their legs hurt. Hung had two surgeries to treat her pain. At the garment factory, the workers rushed to pick the smaller size dresses to sew each day, because less fabric meant you could do the work faster and they were paid by the piece, often just a few cents. The size four and set fourteen eight inch. Six inches difference. Yeah. Tong says that makes a very big difference when you're sewing a lot of belts.

The women unionized and they even got health insurance for their families, whereas the men at the restaurants did not. The women would talk while they worked, sharing. During lunch breaks they made their own cloak. They saved enough for their kids to go to college and to leave Chinatown for When I asked the woman how it feels, They said they feel honored to have their story told. Hang starts typing on Google Translate. to make sure that she says this just right. She says that she feels

Their kids are grown now. Hang's daughter works in HR, her son in pharmaceuticals, though she adds with a chuckle, she's not exactly sure what they do in the day-to-day. It's not like sewing dresses. Wenty's son would be happy to hear all of this. He was worried about what the workers would think about his artistic choices. Actually I was a little bit surprised. Nobody criticized my choice of workers to represent them. They say it's qu it's quite right. No. Yeah, so I'm quite pleased with that.

He also hoped that when people saw the statues, they would say, this is me. And they did. Sen's work has helped me see myself in a new way as well. I was born in South Korea and came to the US when I was two. But I don't know much more than that. I grew up in New York. My mom and I are fluent in different languages. Me, I speak English. My mom Korean. So our conversations are just about always tilted. I'm always guessing about who she was before and why she was.

And Asian American stories weren't in textbooks or on library shelves when I was a kid. I'd always wished I knew that I was a good idea. And my grandparents better. I imagine this is what it would have felt like talking to my own. Had he spoken to Or had I spoken his language? Pow Arts Director Cynthia Wu has two children, ages six and three, and they're a mixed race. The statues have made her think about how to talk to her own kids about their family's history.

My six year old just keeps saying I'm not Chinese because I don't speak Chinese. Like he cannot understand the concept identity and race versus language. So that's an actually an interesting thought. Like if I brought my kids in here and talked about like, oh, you know, your grandfather actually your great grandfather actually worked in a restaurant too.

Sophia Chen is a powered staff member and she is also second-generation Chinese American. Her mother was a garment factory worker and her father was a restaurant worker. She was just a child then, but she remembers her mom coming home from work crying a lot. Now she thinks she understands what was behind those tears. All those roles labor wise made them feel very small because there is so little commemoration of this history of these people.

I think there's a lot of internalized like we don't deserve to ask for more from this society. We're not capable of asking for more. So by having these statues be face to face with like this is important history. These are important people. That feels very different from how I was raised and learned about Asian American history, Chinese American history.

Yeah, it's like the statues have become a jumping point for some hard family stories. Mm-hmm. Exactly. Seeing Zen's work has also given Sophia Chen the chance to reflect and to gain new perspective on her parents' life.

For her father, restaurants weren't just a place where he worked and earned a living. They were also places where as an immigrant he found resilience in community. She's also been thinking about what kinds of policies we need around fair wages and working conditions. The way globalization works is like a race to devalue laborers across the world. So I think starting this.

dialogue with how do we make sure that workers are seen, extending to how do we make sure that workers are cared for? How do we make sure we're not always working all the time? I think that's also a big question. From a gallery perspective, Pow Arts director Cynthia Wu worries about something else too. What if this exhibit depicting just four Chinese laborers? What if it brings back old stereotypes? What can we do to make sure that we don't further reduce the image of Chinatown?

kind of unskilled labor narrative too. And I think part of that is making sure that this is the beginning of the many stories that we can tell. Cynthia Wu also doesn't want the city of Boston to feel like they've done their job once the monuments are installed, that they've checked off a box on a checklist. She says there should be many more and many different images of Asian Americans in public art.

Here's Russell Jung, professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Everybody who's seeking to create and produce are changing the narrative. He uses a phrase coined by novelist Viet Tanguin. We need a narrative plenitude. We need a multiplicity of narratives to show the whole range of our humanity. Beyond art and monuments and murals, there's changing representation in Hollywood, in books and K dramas too.

Actors, athletes, and social media influencers who are changing the public image of Asian Americans. But Russell Jung wants us to focus less on these celebrities and more on the grandmother that we see in Wenty Sen's statue. The grandmother is the epitome of the value of Chinese hard work. I think they're very deserving of this acknowledgement.

If I were to name my heroes, it's not the Hollywood star or the pro athlete. It's the grandma who stays at home and watches her brandkid walks them back and forth to school, helps them get washed and ready for bed because I think that's real love.

I have a 10-year-old daughter. In part, I'm making this podcast for her. So that she has more images and ideas of what it means to be Asian American. Like when you're going to be able to do Then I'm creating new art. She doesn't need to grow up in the same America that I did, so that she can navigate a subway platform or a dating app. be afraid. I want her to know that she belongs here. People are going to listen to what she has to say.

Wen T Sen and the city of Boston are still deciding where the permanent worker statues will be installed in Chinatown. One option is to mark the former site of the Garmin Factory Workers' Union. Another is to put the four statues at the borders of Chinatown to become historical markers in a neighborhood that's quickly changing and gentrifying. Who lives there now? The Chinese family on top, Latino in the middle, and a white gay couple on the bottom.

And that's Lydia Lowe again from the Chinatown Community Land Trust. There'll be community gatherings to ask local residents for their input too. In the future, Sen also envisions interviewing modern-day laborers and adding a QR code, or whatever the current technology may be, to each worker statue. This way, visitors can hear those voices too. And I hope that a lot of people will use these statues

In the museums and things people always say never touching things. But I would like these statues to be strong enough so that children can climb on the go in the lap of the grandmother is pretty much indestructible. At age 87, Wenty Sen knows the statues will long outlive him, and that's his vision: that they'll last as long as the statues on Boston's Freedom Trail, alongside Paul Revere and Ben Franklin. And the others who laid America's foundations.

giving immigrant workers their due. In the story we're telling, This episode of Monumental was written and produced by Heidi Shen. Special thanks to Vicky Merrick. Also to the POW Arts Center. And the many immigrant laborers who made our country what it is today. To see images of windows Chinatown workers statute. Visit the POW Arts Center's website. That's www. Arts.org The senior editor for Monumental is Rosalyn Tordicilius, and our senior producer is Nancy Rosenbaum.

Jamie York is our writer and our associate producer is Lauren Francis. The show is recorded by Bryce Bush. Ben Erickson at Earshot Audio Post and mixed by Tommy Bazarian. With support from Emmanuel Desarme, Pedro Rafael Rosal. Fact checking by Christina Ribello. Our theme was composed and produced by Gelani Bowman, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager and our executive producer. is Jocelyn Gonzalez.

PRX Productions and made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. For more on the show us at prx.org. Coming up. How a race massacre and coup d'etat in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 destroyed a rare multi-racial. Democracy built just after the Civil War. And how decades of silence and lies made it so hard to be able to do that. Testament to the truth. Let sleeping dogs lie. Don't don't bring this up. Why do you want to bring this up now after almost a hundred years?

Thanks for listening. From PRX